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It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been busy with my personal life and some changes on my professional life…

Actually, I left my last company (Emergya) because I was needing a change and I had the possibility of start to work on Guadalinex (Ubuntu based distribution from Andalusia, Spain) full time. Guadalinex is a very important project for the Spanish FLOSS community and It’s very important for me as well.

There were some problems to start at my new position and I’ve been something like two month off, waiting for my job.

Meanwhile I’ve been a bit disconnected of the GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian and floss world in general, and I’ve been more focused on recovering and improving my health. I came back to doing climbing, running, Ninjutsu, some parkour, I’ve been eating more vegetables and fruits, I’ve been visiting my physiotherapist… You know, trying to fix a bit my sedentary life.

But there were more problems with my new position which made me worry about my future and my economy…

Then my previous company offered me another position, this time it was a very good job, the one I was looking for last time I was working there. And because of several reasons (which weren’t easy decisions at all) I took that job

So, I’m about to start a new stage of my personal and professional life and that is very linked to the FLOSS world

They call the position Community Manager, but it’s not “online community manager“. It is not about create online community around our products and so, it is about build (or to get stronger) free software community inside the company and putting the means for our developers to be able of sharing knowledge with people from other communities (GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian, Drupal, gvSIG, Redmine, Rails…).

We’ve been very focused on looking for good clients, growing up as a small-medium company and we have a bunch a good developers with very good skills and know how, but not all of them come from the free software world and they need to know how to share all that knowledge and how interact with the community. The rest, just need tools and opportunities for working as they want, in a open way.

Connect our GIS people with open GIS projects, our Drupal hackers with the Drupal developers, our distro experts with Ubuntu, Debian and GNOME people and so on, plus a few more things is going to be my life in, at least, one year from now.

I’m very excited about this and I think is going to be great for all of us and, I hope, for the communities we’ll try to help. We’ve been receiving so much from them and it is time to give a bit back to them.

Well, this is all by now, but I’ll come back here to tell you all our progress and to share knowledge and experiences.

The last 7th of May I was at the III University Free Software Contest‘s final fase. That event is a really interesting and (IMHO) very important for the free software community world in Spain.

The event takes place at several universities in Spain and have this final fase in Seville. In each university, the student that want to participate, have to start a free software project and follow some rules:

The project must be register in a public forge with public Subversion, wiki, maillist and so on.

They have to public their progress in a blog, so the people can follow the projects. All the projects’ blogs are syndicated in the contest’s planet.

They also have more points if they create a community around their projects.

And, of course, the project must have some kind of free software license.

I’ve have the pleasure and honor to be member of the jury to evaluate those projects and it’s really hopeful to see those young students learning how to develop a project with free software tools and methodologies. And some projects are really amazing and are already in few distributions or even OS.

This initiative is very helpful to the people from the universities who have great ideas, but they don’t know how the community works or even the normal developing tools. You know… sometimes at the universities the knowledge is too much theoretically… At least in Spain.

I have to apologize to the organization because in this edition I didn’t do my duty as a member of the jury. The work, my mess with the mail and the chaos inside of my head… But I have no excuses, really and I do regret no to have evaluated the projects, because there were some quite interesting…

Thanks anyway to all the organization and the rest of the jury. By the way, this event is good for me also because some members of the jury are very good friends (and GNOMErs :-P) but living in other places and they come for the final fase so I can meet them